Why SEO?
As you are building your website, you will probably hear a lot about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you are new to putting a website on the internet, you may be wondering why SEO has such an importance in your design and marketing efforts.
SEO is more important to your website marketing efforts then in the past. A few years ago you could get away with only putting in META tags, and that is how search engines read your website. However because people started spamming meta tag keywords, search engines started getting smart and started ignoring the keyword area on your META tags. Many search engines do ignore the keyword area in your META tags. Therefore you can not solely rely on your META tags to work for you in your favor.
You will have to optimize your site in many other ways, so that search engines will look at your site more, and in a positive way. It can take a long amount of time to get your site where you want it placed in the search engines, but with a lot of hard work you can get there.
One thing you must be aware of is SEO companies who say they can get you into the number one spot in a very short amount of time. These SEO companies who make these claims use black hat tactics, which will result in your website being banned by search engines. Black hat uses non organic tricks, and essentially “spams” the search engines. You want to make sure that the work you put into your optimization is organic, and you never want to end up with a website that is banned. If your website does get banned, it is extremely difficult to get it unbanned. You do not want to put yourself or your business in this position. It is better to take the time and do it right, then be banned from the search engines.
Some SEO tricks that do not work:
Special search engine pages: Although these pages are not considered “bad”, they are not necessary for organic search engine optimization. The only time you want to have special landing pages is if you have a marketing campaign going, and you want to direct people to a specific landing page. But for optimization, these are unnecessary, and do not help your website optimization overall.
Optimizing only one keyword per page: This is another technique that does not help your website overall. Your entire website should have a few keywords that will be optimized over the entire site. However there will be a couple pages that have a few other keywords, but you do not want to focus on only one keyword for the page. When someone searches and comes across your site, you want them to see as many pages as possible show up on the search engines. The more your website is optimized, the more someone will happen to click on to your website.
Not using tables in HTML: Some ‘solely’ CSS designers will tell you that you can not use tables in HTML. This isn’t true. Those designers are trying to get your business to re-create your website. It is a scam in essence. The choice between CSS and a table layout is in actuality personal preference. But one over the other will absolutely not help you in search engine optimization.
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